New Year, New Strategy For Practicing Singing

How often you practice, and for what duration, depends on your goals as a singer.  We all know that practicing improves skill, but do you want to become the next opera singer, a pop star, or do you just want to improve your singing-in-the-shower skills?  For dedicated singers with professional level goals, or professionals preparing for concerts, you might practice as long as one or even two hours a day.  On the other end of the spectrum, even just a few minutes of practicing a day, or 15-30 minutes two or three days a week can pay off in big ways.

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SEO Tips For Getting Your Music To A Wider Audience

Gone are the days where you needed to create a demo, submit it to a record label and hope for a deal. With enough capital, you can record your own music, promote it and become an independent artist. While it’s not an easy process, you can develop strong strategies to help you find traction within the marketplace. Consider some of the best SEO tips you can use in order to get your music to a wider audience.

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Making Merch Work For You Now – Covid Edition

We are living in trying times for sure, friends. And while this IS temporary, it may be some time before you can take your show back on the road. With this harsh reality looming, the first instinct may be to panic. Try not to do that - don’t let uncertainty prevent you from moving forward. The best thing we can do for ourselves now is to keep going, find ways to pivot, and figure out how to weather this storm.  

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6 Marketing Strategies To Get You Featured On Playlists

In this DSP era, getting discovered in such an insanely crowded space is the main focus for artists looking to make it big. Platforms like Spotify and Apple Music offer MILLIONS of tracks, so how is it possible to get recognized as an independent musician trying to break through the noise?

One good way to do it is with playlisting. 

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7 Top Marketing Strategies For Musicians

This guest post by Patrick McGuire originally apeared on the Bandzoogle Blog

For many artists, marketing is somewhat at odds with who they are and what they do. Since music and the act writing songs is often deeply personal and emotional, getting into a music marketing strategy mindset might seem foreign, fake or forced for some musicians.

Sadly, this doesn’t change the fact that it’s never been more difficult for new artists to put their music in front of listeners. Between music streaming platforms and the cheap cost of DIY home recording technology, there’s more music being released now than at any other point in history.

Tens of thousands of new songs are being released each day, and, in many cases, what determines whether each of these songs will go on to find an audience or not depends on how they’re marketed. Not sure how to market your music? Here’s 7 music marketing strategies to get you started:

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Music Cities Convention Memphis – Harness The Power Of Music To Make Better Cities

Music plays a major, boundless role in city life. Yet most locals pay little attention to the multifaceted work that goes into developing vibrant, open cities capable of attracting, nurturing, and retaining musical talent and sustaining a rich nightlife. Enter Music Cities Convention: a bold attempt of putting music cities—their creation, current state, and sustainability—on political agendas throughout the world.

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High-Integrity Strategy For Artists Who Hate Selling And Email Marketing

This article is actually a lesson from Let Fans Pay You, a course that outlines essential automated marketing strategy for artists, entertainers and their management companies. Click here to get this 5-part course delivered to you free of charge.

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In this lesson of Let Fans Pay You, I’m going to explain the awkward tension every artist feels when it comes to email marketing and the strategy for alleviating that tension altogether.

That tension? Selling to your email list.

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Buzz: There's More to a Free Music Campaign than Free Music...

You’ve done it again. You’ve given away a free track from your latest album. It’s on your website. You’ve talked about it on Facebook. Job done, you think. Well think again. There’s no doubt about it. Free music is a powerful marketing tool. However, the music industry has become so over-saturated with free music that we’ve become desensitized to the process of consuming, promoting, and thinking about the importance of free music. This age-old debate has become, well, old.

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What Can We Learn From Indie Band Pomplamoose?

Having been hearing about the growing success of the band Pomplamoose many times now, I decided to check them out and listen to their music/interviews and watch some of their videos to get a feel for who they were-both as artists, and see what we could learn from this independent band who have carved out a living with STRICTLY their MUSIC, using a 99% web-based business model. Listening to them in the first interview with Tech Crunch’s Andrew Keen, Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn answered several very basic questions, of which, although the interview could have been hosted better to get down to some more insightful questions, the resulting insight I continue to find the more I learn about this powerhouse duo remains consistent with the very simple mantra this band has so very successfully modeled for us as independent musicians in our brave new music business. Pomplamoose, who have now turned down all of the “big three” major labels – are in fact making enough money to live in a fully paid for house, primarily off iTunes revenue, and don’t see the need OR the strategic advantage to sign with a major record label. The bottom line is that Record labels today - are more like general contractors who hire other companies to do things for the artist, (when, with a little knowledge and ambition one could go hire that company directly) and decision makers for those who don’t want or don’t know where to start with building their own business model. Perhaps not as extreme as “the powerful praying on the ignorant and powerless,” but something close to that, is what perpetuates most of the unknown yet talented and intelligent signed acts that you’ve never heard of.

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Mobile Marketing for Independent Artists: Tools

So this is it. The final installment in my series on mobile marketing for independent musicians (sob!). We’ve discussed the reality. We’ve established the importance of strategy. Now it’s time to talk tools! So exactly what tools are out there for the average, hard- working DIY musician? Are the all-singing, all-dancing mobile marketing campaigns of established artists totally out of reach?

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10 Stupid Album Release Screw Ups

I’m filling in on bass for a band that’s gearing up to release their new CD. When filling in for a band, I try to take a back seat on the band’s business. However, I sometimes just cannot keep my big mouth shut. In this case, the guys were discussing details of their upcoming CD release, and I had to chime in. Here’s a rant based on both my experience with my former band and quite a few drunken conversations with various bands over the years.

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Great Marketers Aren't Afraid To Annoy and Why You Need To Think Like Them

I used to be afraid of always talking about my music to people, whether it was online or offline. Mainly because I was afraid I would annoy and lose them. I found myself in a dilemma of sorts because the promotion of my music was inconsistent as result. And inconsistency doesn’t breed success. So I had to check myself. I was taking this music thing too personally. I needed to step back and be a bit more objective with my career. I needed to think like a businessman. After all, I’ve spent 6 years building my own marketing company.

As I understood business, when you have a good product, the main task at hand is to figure out ways to let your target audience know it exists and raise your product’s profile in their lives. That is your focus. You are the owner. You are the marketer. The success of that product is in your hands. And, being in music makes no difference. If I ever want to make this passion my “9 to 5”, I had better pull things together. What I’ve found is that it took just as much creativity to be in business as it did to make music. Both requires you to take what is seemingly nothing and make it into something. Except when it comes to the business side of things, your job is to make your music, which at the start is nothing in the mind of a consumer, become something meaningful to that consumer. And the key to great marketing is one word: frequency.

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Buy One, Give One Free: What Artists Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurship

One of my greatest frustrations with respect to marketing has been that while I speak often about human’s predisposition to share, we’ve yet — in the entertainment realm — developed a way to encourage/reward sharing/sharers.

A bit of background. It was when music/books/movies/etc. went from being objects (analog) to being information (digital) that people could finally satisfy their hard-wired impulse to share with no downside.

Prior to this, if I wanted to share an album/book/DVD with you, when I gave it to you I was deprived of my copy — you win, I half lose/half win. Post the shift to information, when I share my digital versions with you, I still keep my copy — we both win.

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Management In The Music Industry

Peter Drucker stated, “Long-range planning is necessary precisely because we cannot forecast[1].” According to this statement, planning is essential to any enterprise so that the right decisions can be made when the environment changes. Music enterprises must be able to strategize and plan in order to create value for its customers. Strategizing and planning allows the enterprise to create its goals in its mission and vision for all levels of the hierarchy to strive for.

For example, Motown Records’ mission statement was, when it was first created, to “unite and bring people together through music[2].” A mission statement, as being part of planning, was created for Motown Records so that all artists, publishers, employees, and presidents of Motown Records would make decisions based on “uniting and bringing people together.” Knowledge of the goals and direction of the enterprise are necessary to know throughout the entire enterprise so that everyone knows what decisions are to be made and which are the right ones[3].  Motown Records brought value to its customers that shared the same ideal in music: the desire to unite people. Planning the mission and vision statement encompasses all decision-making for music enterprises. After knowing the enterprise’s plan, any employee or superior would have to ask, “Does this decision align with our core values and work towards our vision as a music enterprise?” Customers will value an enterprise that is consistent with its plan to create that value for its customers.

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